The savage looked around him, and suddenly turning his dromedary, rode straight towards my place of concealment. I grasped my hoe, resolved if he had seen me, not to yield up my wretched existence without a desperate struggle; but all unconscious of my presence, his sable majesty dismounted, placed his asseguy against the chestnut tree, spread a grass-mat at its root, and seating himself, proceeded quietly to light a species of hubble-bubble, or pipe made from a reed and a nut-shell. Stuffing therein some dried herbs, he applied flint and steel, and began leisurely and literally to enjoy his morning weed.
At his neck I could see poor Robert Hartly's gold locket glittering.
The vicinity of this ferocious and tremendous personage, with the chances of his horde being all within hail, like the band of Roderick Dhu, so greatly alarmed me, that fully a quarter of an hour elapsed before I rallied sufficiently to conceive the idea of appropriating his quiet and docile dromedary (which was cropping the herbage close by), and using it as a means of reaching Cape Coast Castle, the western goal of all my hopes.
I knew that this animal was deemed a miracle of swiftness even in that burning clime, where they will travel with ease fifty miles per day.
The savage King seemed to be asleep, or in a waking doze; but I knew that by habits of danger, activity, and a life spent in the open air, the senses of these people were so acute, that the slightest sound would revive him; and that, if once discovered, he could crush me like a shrimp in his powerful grasp.
"Can I not kill him?" thought I, as furious thoughts began to fill my mind; "my hoe is too light—ha! the stone!"
I snatched the stone, which with difficulty I had conveyed up the tree overnight, as a missile against wild animals, and poised it in my hands. It was nearly twelve pounds weight, and the woolly skull of the King was immediately below me; but it might be thick as that of an elephant, so the missile would prove more harmless than a ball of worsted.
If I missed, death to me was certain; if I slew or stunned him, I had an equal certainty of escape. Then I thought of poor Captain Baylis, of his tortured wife, of Hartly, and of that horrible butchery by the steep rocks of the river Gabon, and a glow of merciless fury filled my soul!
The stone shot from my hand, and, bathed in blood, quivering and senseless, the brutal King of the Snake River rolled among the long dry grass, with foam issuing from his mouth, and the aperture below it.
Swift as lightning I descended the tree—all cramped and stiff by a night passed amid its branches; caught his dromedary by the bridle, sprang upon its back, snatched up the asseguy as a weapon for defence, and, without casting a glance to ascertain whether I had been guilty of actual regicide, or had merely given him a crack upon his imperial crown, urged the animal I bestrode westward at furious speed, through a grove of pale green orange trees, where the rich dewy fruit hung like balls of gleaming gold in the light of the morning sun.